The Association of Software Professionals (ASP), formerly Association of Shareware Professionals, was a

professional association A professional association (also called a professional body, professional organization, or professional society) usually seeks to advocacy, further a particular profession, the interests of individuals and organisations engaged in that professio ...

for authors and developers of

freeware Freeware is software, most often proprietary, that is distributed at no monetary cost to the end user. There is no agreed-upon set of rights, license, or EULA that defines ''freeware'' unambiguously; every publisher defines its own rules for the f ...

, commercial, and

shareware Shareware is a type of proprietary software that is initially shared by the owner for trial use at little or no cost. Often the software has limited functionality or incomplete documentation until the user sends payment to the software developer ...

computer software Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...

. It was formed in April 1987, and for a time, it was considered as the most popular

trade organization A trade association, also known as an industry trade group, business association, sector association or industry body, is an organization founded and funded by businesses that operate in a specific industry. An industry trade association partic ...

for independent

software developers A computer programmer, sometimes referred to as a software developer, a software engineer, a programmer or a coder, is a person who creates computer programs — often for larger computer software. A programmer is someone who writes/creates ...

and vendors. The ASP developed and maintain the

Portable Application Description PAD or Portable Application Description is a machine-readable document format and specification designed by the Association of Software Professionals and introduced in 1998. The PAD specification is utilized by more than 6,000 software publishers ...

(PAD) format used to allow software authors to provide product descriptions and specifications to online sources in a standard way. As of 2021, the PAD file specification was utilized by over 40,000 software publishers and a 1000+ PAD supported software catalog websites. The PAD system is popular because web sites can pull updated data from a single file stored on the software author's site. The final release of the PAD specification, v4.0 was released to the public domain as of January 2022. The ASP also played a role in making

FILE_ID.DIZ FILE_ID.DIZ is a plain-text file containing a brief description of the content of archive formats, archive to which it belongs. Such files were originally used in archives distributed through bulletin board systems (BBSes) and is still used in the ...

files a

de facto standard A ''de facto'' standard is a custom or convention that has achieved a dominant position by public acceptance or market forces (for example, by early entrance to the market). is a Latin phrase (literally " in fact"), here meaning "in practice b ...

. In 2011, the ASP purchased the rights to the Software Industry Conference from the

Software Industry Awards Foundation Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...

. The conference was renamed ISVCon.ISVCon About Information
After a 34-year run, the ASP ceased operations on December 31, 2021, following a membership decision to dissolve the organization.

References

External links

* Businesspeople in software Technology trade associations {{prof-assoc-stub